“We heard, from one who knew him well (what should be stated in all mention of his lamentable irregularities), that with a single glass of wine his whole nature was reversed, the demon became uppermost, and, though none of the usual signs of intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane.  In this reversed character, we repeat, it was never our chance to meet him.”

On September 22, 1835, Poe married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, in Baltimore.  She had barely turned thirteen years, Poe himself was but twenty-six.  He then was a resident of Richmond and a regular contributor to the “Southern Literary Messenger.”  It was not until a year later that the bride and her widowed mother followed him thither.

Poe’s devotion to his child-wife was one of the most beautiful features of his life.  Many of his famous poetic productions were inspired by her beauty and charm.  Consumption had marked her for its victim, and the constant efforts of husband and mother were to secure for her all the comfort and happiness their slender means permitted.  Virginia died January 30, 1847, when but twenty-five years of age.  A friend of the family pictures the death-bed scene—­mother and husband trying to impart warmth to her by chafing her hands and her feet, while her pet cat was suffered to nestle upon her bosom for the sake of added warmth.

These verses from “Annabel Lee,” written by Poe in 1849, the last year of his life, tell of his sorrow at the loss of his child-wife: 

I was a child and she was a child,
 In a kingdom by the sea;

But we loved with a love that was more than love—­
  I and my Annabel Lee;

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
 Coveted her and me. 
And this was the reason that, long ago;
 In this kingdom by the sea. 
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
 My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her high-born kinsmen came
 And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
 In this kingdom by the sea,

Poe was connected at various times and in various capacities with the “Southern Literary Messenger” in Richmond, Va.; “Graham’s Magazine” and the “Gentleman’s Magazine” in Philadelphia.; the “Evening Mirror,” the “Broadway journal,” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book” in New York.  Everywhere Poe’s life was one of unremitting toil.  No tales and poems were ever produced at a greater cost of brain and spirit.

Poe’s initial salary with the “Southern Literary Messenger,” to which he contributed the first drafts of a number of his best-known tales, was $10 a week!  Two years later his salary was but $600 a year.  Even in 1844, when his literary reputation was established securely, he wrote to a friend expressing his pleasure because a magazine to which he was to contribute had agreed to pay him $20 monthly for two pages of criticism.

Those were discouraging times in American literature, but Poe never lost faith.  He was finally to triumph wherever pre-eminent talents win admirers.  His genius has had no better description than in this stanza from William Winter’s poem, read at the dedication exercises of the Actors’ Monument to Poe, May 4, 1885, in New York: